[Resolved] Gold Market Issue

We identified the severity of the problem, and fortunately there was no need for a rollback.

Here is what we are currently doing to resolve this problem:

1. The accounts involved in gold creation will be suspended temporarily and investigated by us.

2. Accounts that bought lots of gold cheaply as a result of the gold exploit will not be suspended. However, we'll be treating this one a case by cases basis and go through the transaction logs and reverse these transactions.
If you benefited from the artificially low gold prices, do not sell or use that gold such that the claw back goes smoothly - otherwise, and we will have to suspend the accounts in question. Note that even If the gold is used / sold, we'll still be able to claw it back.

We will update you once the necessary actions have been completed.

Why don't you do a rollback?
We see some of you requesting and discussing the decision on whether or not to do a rollback. We would like to give you an insight into what a roll-back can mean for us. The fact is, as some of you may already be aware, a roll-back itself can potentially take numerous hours, with the severe implication that entire player base would not be able to access the game for this period. Therefore, a roll-back is a course of action that we would only consider given there was no other available avenue being presented. On top of that, a rollback would affect all players, instead of a contained subset.
Knowing how this may affect our community as a whole and those anticipating/ preparing for the F2P launch, we opted for a solution that took both sides into account - real-time action with which we could minimize the damage to our economy with immediate effect, while making the game accessible to everyone as soon as possible.

here is some more background information on this to put things into perspective:

The total amount of fake gold created by the exploit as been very small.

It was around 3 days worth of the gold that would be injected by starter pack sales (excluding gold packs) prior to the F2P. The vast vast majority of this has already been frozen by us. The net impact of the exploit will hence equal a few hours equal of gold supply at most.

The number of accounts involved directly in the exploit is also quite small. That includes those accounts who indirectly benefited by buying gold at a low silver price.

This is why we felt that we can handle this quite well without a roll back in the first place. Had there been any sort of significant economic damage, we would have done a roll back.

Now with regards to the price spikes in individual items:
Keep in mind that each pre-existing game pack generated an extra 1.000 gold as part of the F2P-launch rewards. The amount of gold generated by this absolutely dwarfs what has been generated by the gold exploit (and makes it practically insignificant when taking into account that most of it is frozen). Hence, there is a high chance that item spikes are not directly related to the gold exploit.

If, during the investigation, we found that people somehow maliciously thought they could hide ill-gotten currency through items, we will take care of this. Keep in mind that we have quite a lot of experience in dealing with illicit game currency due to having to deal with lots of RMT shortly after release.

2. Accounts that bought lots of gold cheaply as a result of the gold exploit will not be suspended. However, we'll be treating this one a case by cases basis and go through the transaction logs and reverse these transactions. If you benefited from the artificially low gold prices, do not sell or use that gold such that the claw back goes smoothly - otherwise, and we will have to suspend the accounts in question. Note that even If the gold is used / sold, we'll still be able to claw it back.

You can now freely trade your Silver and Gold in the game. If your account was involved and you have any questions left about your specific situation, please reach out to us via support

Do you have plans to handle the rampant inflation caused by this? Tomes jumped up 2.5x, Crystal rhinos up 3x, other rare expensive things also bought out. This indicates to me that people are hiding their ill gotten gains. Tomes via fame credits, items in chests, on islands, traded to friends , sold to randoms for more silver etc.... it seems like this is impossible to clean up. Especially when some guilds did CTAs to abuse the exploit and launder the proceeds using shill and random members to hide it. System abuse by top guilds seems reminiscent of the issue with crafting journals.. will the people warned about that exploit but escaped be banned.

Not to be inflammatory but a rollback is definitely required. Look at the market and the inflation that has taken place. It shows that people are disregarding your request to not use the Silver from cheap gold bought because of this "exploit."

The amount of transactions and the increase in costs is indicative of some deep levels of laundering taking place. The layers are going deeper, people are turning that Gold and Silver into Fame, mounts, etc...

If your save states for a rollback got messed up because of F2P or whatever procedures you didn't account for, that is another issue. Rollback is the appropriate response to what is currently happening in this game. The economy is destroyed.

Look I understand a rollback is a lot of work and impacts everyone but you cannot reassure people that the economy will not be adversely affected forever otherwise. You can see how much prices have skyrocketed for items as people attempt to launder and hide there ill gotten gains. How are we to believe in a player driven economy ever again when we've seen billions upon billions of silver enter the market today with only the promise that you'll track down and reverse these transactions? People have made 100's of transactions with this gold to multiple accounts, you cannot convince me you have the staff or the manpower to investigate hundreds of thousands of trades across the last several hours to "claw back" this exploited gold. Rollback while you still have time

I'm little confused to be honset. From one point of view Ninjaduff is right, eventually most of bug abusers will get banned. But on the other hand it will take quite a while for prices to flat and it's not possible to reverse all issues that comes from it. In my opinion rollback should be seriously considered but i also understand that it is not easy decision to make. I just believe that if players will persuade you to make a rollback you will make it within one hour, cuz sooner is better.

Economy is changed guys, now move on, the prices will eventually flat like before, its the law of the market.
Now just watch those bug abusers being banned.

this is a really, really dumb comment

Look son , someone is getting ban soon

yeah and it's probably going to be you judging from your previous dumb comment

you're probably a part of this issue

edit so im not spamming replies: The issue isn't with the market stabilizing. It's with a small group of players buying huge amount of gold due to an exploit occurring with the prices then selling it back for a massive profit margin. If this doesn't get addressed SPECIFICALLY TO THESE PLAYERS AND THE GUILD then there will never be a chance to compete with them financially ever.

I'm little confused to be honset. From one point of view Ninjaduff is right, eventually most of bug abusers will get banned. But on the other hand it will take quite a while for prices to flat and it's not possible to reverse all issues that comes from it. In my opinion rollback should be seriously considered but i also understand that it is not easy decision to make. I just believe that if players will persuade you to make a rollback you will make it within one hour, cuz sooner is better.

i agree buddy. The problem with rollback is that it doesnt affect premium as its an account status. but otherwise it would have been the best idea. just rip everyone 2hours. still better than a 12 hours rollback tho..

No rollback means I'm out of the game as an econ/crafter player, seeing everything in shambles... The "air" money has already been hidden away/laundered everywhere, through so many nested means on such a vast amount of players/islands/chests/stacks moved across several accounts etc., there is no way you're going to find even 50% of it without everything turning into an utter clusterfuck. It was a fun game while it lasted, way to handle it or pretend handle i should say....

If you take a step back and even think about their proposed solution it just falls apart. How many GM's do they actively employ? Think of the time it would take to investigate a flagged account and review every transaction made by that player and if it was done with this exploited gold. What about the people they bought items from with it, are they innocent now? You've stated in this post your real-time action has minimized damage to the economy but you if look at the prices of items and the inflation that has occurred over the last several hours we know that to be incorrect.

What your playing with right now is the confidence of your player base that you're on top of this and can provide a solution. A rollback before prime-time would go a long way to restore this otherwise I just don't believe its logistically possible for you to find and eliminate all this gold, too many accounts took part in such a widespread bug and the economy damage is readily apparent.

If you take a step back and even think about their proposed solution it just falls apart. How many GM's do they actively employ? Think of the time it would take to investigate a flagged account and review every transaction made by that player and if it was done with this exploited gold. What about the people they bought items from with it, are they innocent now? You've stated in this post your real-time action has minimized damage to the economy but you if look at the prices of items and the inflation that has occurred over the last several hours we know that to be incorrect.

What your playing with right now is the confidence of your player base that you're on top of this and can provide a solution. A rollback before prime-time would go a long way to restore this otherwise I just don't believe its logistically possible for you to find and eliminate all this gold, too many accounts took part in such a widespread bug and the economy damage is readily apparent.

As someone who has had to go through logs on servers in an enterprise environment where everything is monitored and backed up i can guarantee you, they won't be able to do what they claim. Even one compromise took us days of work with a team of 20 professionals, this is like a compromise across the entire environment by thousands of actors simultaneously. Either they overestimate their own abilities or they just don't care. Probably the latter. If they were able to do what they claim, they wouldn't be making games, but billions doing enterprise monitoring software/agents.